5 Easy Tips to Make Your Subject Lines Stand Out in a Crowded Inbox

June 5, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Subject line should stand out

Crafting email subject lines can be a trying experience. You’ve tested like crazy, and you’ve made sure to personalize your emails, but you’re still not getting the open rates that you were hoping for.

The truth is that your email marketing campaigns live and die by the quality of the subject line. Some loyal customers will open anything that you send, but the rest you might lose by the second word.

So how do you get more eyeballs on your emails? Let’s go over a few quick tips that should get you more clicks!

Put the offer/information up front

The further back in the subject line your offer is, the less chance it has of being read. Position is everything and subject lines on mobile devices get cut even shorter than their desktop counterparts.

So if you’re offering free shipping on your product for a week, make sure that that the words “free shipping” appear early in the subject line. Promo codes can wait for the body of your email.

Keep your subject line short

You probably know this one already. Nobody is going to read a brilliant 20 word-long subject line where you rhyme and make an allusion to a popular piece of fiction.

What will they read? Short 8-10 word lines that give them the information they need to know.

Give it a sense of urgency

Along with the offer, you want to make sure that your customers know that this deal isn’t going to last forever. Nothing spurs people to action like the thought of missing something. Time restraints make people take action right now instead of getting to it later.

Having a longer sale? Advertising a month or week-long sale might not sound as urgent, but your follow up emails certainly will!

Make it personal

You need to dig deeper into your customer data to determine the different kinds of email subscribers that you have. Then break down your email marketing into those different groups.

If you sell social media marketing solutions to clients, the needs of a small business are going to be different than those of a large brand. So tailor your subject lines to those particular individuals. Small business owners would be delighted to read “Let us handle your social media while you focus on your business” while large brands would be more interested in “Our software lets you monitor and reply to your fans in no time!”

Triple check your spelling and grammar

Easiest way to ensure your potential customers don’t open your email? By misspelling words or using incorrect grammar. Your and you’re can be easy to switch when you’re working quickly. We’ve all used the wrong they’re, their, or there.

But when clients read the wrong word or the wrong spelling, that looks like you don’t have the time or interest to check the work you present to the world. And if you’re not going to take an interest in your own company, why would your email recipients?

Bonus tip: Be clever

Asking a clever question, adding a graphic, or mirroring presidential email marketing campaigns can have varying degrees of success. But the need to be clever should never overshadow any of these other tips.

Consumers are getting savvier about their emails and want to clean out their inbox as quickly as possible. Make sure you test your emails, but a short, to-the-point subject line can outshine even the cleverest questions.

Which would you click: “Free shipping on all apparel– this weekend only!” or “Don’t you fancy a new sweater?”

Do you use any of these tips in your email marketing campaigns? Any you’d like to share?

 

Mandy Kilinskis is a Content Developer for Quality Logo Products, a longtime WhatCounts client. When she’s not writing content for their homepage or promo blog, she’s helping craft subject lines for their email marketing. Feel free to say hi to her on Twitter or Google+!

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Gmail Deliverability Improvements: Tips and Tricks

May 23, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Gmail mailboxes

One of the questions that deliverability professionals hear most often – and with good reason – is, “How do I get to the inbox at Gmail?” Over the past few years, Google has worked to establish its Gmail product as an innovator in the area of spam filtering, enacting changes that are having a notable impact across the email industry. However, many of these changes also make it harder for senders to have their mail routed to the inbox.

Just over a year ago, Chris Penn wrote a great article on the reasons Gmail provides when a message is routed to the spam folder. This is still a great resource and is a good place to start if you find your messages aren’t getting to the Gmail inbox. In many cases, though, the answer goes beyond the explanations Gmail provides. Here, we’d like to provide a bit more insight for those times that Gmail’s answer has left you scratching your head.

Get to Know Gmail

The first step in improving your mail’s performance to Gmail is to know a little about how Google filters and routes incoming mail.
First of all, engagement is key. Gmail has built a reputation on using engagement metrics to determine mail folder placement. Senders with high engagement rates are more likely to get mail delivered to the inbox, and vice versa. To put it very simply, if your users aren’t opening your emails, those emails won’t make it to the inbox.

Gmail also uses domain reputation heavily in determining how to route incoming mail, but they don’t just weigh the reputation of the domain(s) in the From and Reply-to fields. Gmail scans the entire message for any domain that appears in the headers or body of the message. The reputation of each domain in the message, including image hosting and link URLs, is considered in the filtering process.

Cracking the Inbox

There is no single change, or even set of changes, that are guaranteed to get you to the Gmail inbox. However, there are a few things you can do to improve the chances your mail is delivered there.

Target engaged contacts. Since Gmail relies on engagement in its filtering, you should identify contacts who haven’t opened any emails in a set period of time. The recommended time period will vary depending on the frequency of your mailings, but a good rule of thumb is that contacts who haven’t engaged (opened or clicked) in 6-12 months should be suppressed or removed from your sending rotation.

Get whitelisted. While Gmail doesn’t offer a traditional whitelist, there are ways you can have your recipients add you to their personal whitelists. When a subscriber adds your address to his or her Gmail Contacts, mail from that address will bypass most filtering. If a subscriber wants to ensure he or she never misses a mailing from you, Gmail also allows creating filters that will prevent any mail from a specific email address (or domain) from ever getting routed to the spam folder.

Know your affiliates. Affiliate programs can be attractive to email marketers, but they can also be a hindrance to good email deliverability. Gmail calls out affiliate programs specifically in its Best Practices for senders, noting that they sometimes attract spammers and can be harmful to your sending reputation. If you do participate in affiliate marketing, be mindful of the partners and offers included in your mailings: The reputation of every brand or company advertised in your mailing will be considered when filtering your message. Gmail also states clearly that sending on behalf of affiliates with bad mailing practices can get your mail routed to spam.

Authenticate. Gmail uses DKIM authentication to attempt to verify the identity of mail senders. If you are not signing with DKIM, your signatures don’t match, or you are using a key less than 1024 bits in length, your mail is more likely to be routed to the spam folder.

Following these best practices is a great way to improve inbox placement, but this improvement rarely happens overnight. It’s a good idea to allow a few weeks for improvement after each round of changes.

If you have questions about Gmail deliverability or are having specific issues, please contact WhatCounts Support for further assistance.

Brad Gurley
Director of Deliverability, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Feature Friday: Manage Links (Even After You’ve Sent an Email)

May 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

We’ve all been there.

You’ve double-checked the tests of your email and everything is rendering correctly across all inboxes, you’ve selected the correct From name and reply-to address, everything is ready to go, you click to send out an email campaign … and five minutes later, you realize you had a broken link in your code, and everyone who clicks on that link will go to a 404 error page.

Abort mission, the email has been wasted, you’ll have to send it out all over again … right?

Not so fast! Though this was previously the case, a new WhatCounts Publicaster Edition feature now allows you to edit links within a campaign distribution, even if it’s already gone out the door, and for today’s entry in our Feature Friday series, we are going to explore this functionality.

This feature is called Manage Links, and is available to all WhatCounts Publicaster Edition users. Manage Links is found in the Distribution Reports section of the platform, in the same drop-down menu where you select reports such as Click-Through Performance, Opt-Out Detail and Heat Maps:

manage links dropdown menu

After clicking on this report, the platform will bring up a list of all the links currently in the email. The item on the left-hand side is the URL to which a link is going to, and in the middle is the actual text of the link (e.g., “Click here to visit”). This is where you can update the URL to which a link is directing:
manage links campaign distribution menu

After you update the link and click Save, the link will be changed and your email is fixed: It really is that easy!

It’s not as though WhatCounts Publicaster Edition reaches out and “pulls back” all of the original emails and sends out a corrected version.

Remember, when you send an email through the platform, it converts the links in your email to unique tracking URLs, such as cl.publicaster.com or cl.bsf01.com, which then redirect your subscribers to the intended destination. The Manage Links feature works by simply updating where that unique tracking link is redirecting the viewer.

While this is a feature we hope you never have to use, it’s good to know that if the need arises, you can, in fact, fix an email after it has been sent. If you need assistance using the Manage Links feature within WhatCounts Publicaster Edition, please contact your Services Account Manager or Technical Account Manager today.

Tim Brechlin
Inbound Marketing Manager, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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AOL Spam Filtering Changes

May 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

coffee filtering

Last week, Lili Crowley updated the AOL Postmaster blog with notification of some recent spam filtering changes for the AOL network. While the post was fairly vague, providing even this much detail is unusual (but welcome!) behavior for an ISP. In most cases, ISPs and email providers give no notification when such a change is made, leaving email senders to find out through trial and error.

The update stated that AOL will be generating more CON:B1 errors in regards to certain spam messages. CON:B1 errors can be either permanent (“hard”) or temporary (“soft”) bounces, and according to AOL this error indicates a “spike in unfavorable email statistics.” Crowley did not specifically identify what types of messages will be affected, but based on the text of the error, you can be sure negative factors such as complaints and hard bounces will continue to play a large part in this filtering.

Crowley’s post also notes that legitimate senders could be affected by this change. If you are seeing problems with delivery to AOL or have questions about these changes, please contact WhatCounts Support for further assistance.

Brad Gurley
Director of Deliverability, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Feature Friday: XSLT SmartGET HTML Tag

May 10, 2013 By 2 Comments

Say, “XSLT SmartGET HTML tag” ten times fast. We know the name of this new feature in the Professional Edition can be a mouthful, but putting it to use in your email campaigns is the opposite. Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) lets you apply formatting to structured data that you might find on an XML-based API or RSS feed, and then pull it into a WhatCounts email template.

Basically, you can pull already-created content from wherever it’s stored online – an RSS or API feed, for example – and automatically fill an email template with that content. Below is an example of how we used the XSLT tag to automatically pull blog posts from our RSS feed to populate a version of our GameChanger email newsletter.

from the blog

That’s right: We did not write or format any content for the newsletter above. It was all pulled from content that has already been created and stored on our blog. The good news is, you can use the XSLT tag, too! Just pick an email template and insert the tag. Here’s what it looks like in our HTML email template:

XSLT tag

“Article_nm” is the article in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine that contains the XSLT tag template telling you how to display the data you pull. The URL tells us where to find the data, which in this case, is the WhatCounts blog. The data from the RSS feed for our blog, and any other blog, includes a description, links, titles and other elements, all of which can is pulled into the body of our email template using the XSLT tag. The publication date information from an RSS feed can be used for sorting and filtering, as well.

Once you’ve decided which web page you want to pull content off of in order to populate your email, you can then add specific instructions to the article within your email about formatting. For example, below is the article WhatCounts Blog Content and the RSS feed indicated by the arrows is where we are pulling the content from.

RSS feed

We’ve decided that for the first three articles, we want to apply certain formatting and display criteria. To do this, we combine the link and the title to make a link of its own. Then, we are going to put a description and a paragraph below it that title link.

title link and description

The Smart Marketing Engine will pull in content from the RSS feed and will format it according to the rules you’ve set up in the article. The information gets updated when the campaign is sent. After you’re finished formatting, you can see what the final email embedded with the XSLT tag looks like by clicking “Preview” in the email template. This leads us back to where we started:

from the blog

Do you want to save time and energy, but still create dynamic, personalized emails? Then using the XSLT tag is the way to go. Check out the way this feature has been rocking SweetJack’s world by viewing their session slides from the Summit.

And if you like the end result, but don’t think you can set it up, it’s okay. That’s what we’re here for! Just call us or email us and we’ll help you set up the XSLT tag to curate content for your next email campaign.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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4 Ways to Woo Your Abandoned Shopping Cart Customers

May 8, 2013 By Leave a Comment

abandoned shopping carts
Lots of online shoppers do it: They come to your website, add items to an online shopping cart, and then mysteriously disappear, leaving you with no sale. People can be distracted from completing purchases on an online shopping cart by a plethora of digital and human disruptions. They may also browse your website for a specific item, while at the same time searching for better deals or discounts on other retailers’ websites. It’s important and profitable to captivate these shopping cart abandoners through email – 88 percent of consumers have abandoned an online shopping cart without completing a transaction, and that’s a lot of money lost (Biz Report).

Here are four ways you can help your shopping cart abandoners go from purchase insecurity to full-fledged buying enthusiasm:

1. If you give them what they want, they will come.

The message that goes out to your shopping cart abandoners doesn’t have to be fancy; it just has to draw them back to their purchases. Address the possible reasons your customers are hemming and hawing over their would-be purchases: cost of shipping, unprepared to purchase or high price. Promote your deals, specials and offers so they have no reason to look elsewhere for a better price or product. Offer discounted or free shipping. For those people who simply forgot that they were shopping online and had added items to their shopping carts, a, “We miss you!” message may be just the motivator they need to complete the process.

2. Go mobile with your shopping cart

A shopping cart abandonment email can do wonders when it is designed to be viewed and clicked on mobile. More and more people are viewing emails on their mobile devices, which means that it’s imperative digital marketers are designing emails accordingly. We talk about the musts for mobile design in our webinar How to Create a Winning Mobile Email Marketing Strategy, and you can take a look at the way Alaska Airlines redesigned their shopping cart abandonment emails to be opened on a mobile device, too, by viewing the slides from their presentation at our Summit.

In today’s highly-personalized, digital world, people expect emails to be tailored to what they want, as well as be easy to use. Make sure your call to action is not only linked to your customers’ shopping carts, but thumb-sized so they can easily use it on their phones. Making your customers search for a link or read through a block of content is not going to tempt them to get back to their abandoned shopping carts. By far, the best way to find out what type of email motivates your customers is to….

3. Test, test, test

Test when you send your shopping cart abandonment emails. In its campaign, Alaska Airlines found it was best to send the campaign one day after customers had left their online shopping carts. But not all customers are alike, so you need to send tests to determine when your particular shopping cart abandoners are most likely to respond.

Think that images in your emails are more likely to draw customers back in? Maybe…but maybe not. Alaska Airlines found that overall, re-engagement emails without images were much more successful than ones that contained images. You won’t know what works for your company and your customers until you test variants of your content. If you’re a WhatCounts customer, the Smart Marketing Engine has some of the best A/B testing capabilities. Not only is A/B testing highly effective in telling you what your customers want, these tests are simple to set up. Don’t know how to set up an A/B test? Let us show you how! Just send support@whatcounts.com an email, and we’ll walk you through the steps.

4. Automate you shopping cart abandonment emails

Once you’ve tested your content and design, sending emails to shopping cart abandoners is simple in the WhatCounts Smart Marketing Engine through automation. With our advanced segmentation and automated campaign deployment, you can have the Engine send out emails on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. Using automation, shopping cart abandonment campaigns are the simplest way to gain potentially lost revenue with the least amount of effort. It’s Smart Marketing at its best!

Stop losing sales because of shopping cart abandoners. With the right message, email design and timing, your emails could make loyal customers out of these subscribers.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Feature Friday: Social-Only Campaigns for Publicaster

May 3, 2013 By 1 Comment

Welcome to the first post about in a series of many that will walk you through various features in both the Publicaster and Professional Edition platforms. We’ll explain how you can use each feature to help send smarter, more personalized messages through segmentation of data, targeted content and effective automation. Each Friday, we’ll alternate Publicaster and a Professional feature topics. So, since we’re focusing on a Publicaster feature today, next Friday we’ll give Professional Edition the chance to show off what it can do.

Just in case you missed the bus on our spring 2013 Publicaster product release, here’s the news: We’ve got four new features for you to make good use of. If you haven’t already, hop over to our release page and become acquainted with all four features. See the one called social-only campaigns? It’s the underdog of these features: seemingly insignificant but wielding the potential power to help you market smarter.

Convenience. Creativity. Capability to collect the right data: This is what the social-only campaign feature brings you. It uses the direct social publishing feature without incorporating an email delivery element. The convenience is that you send immediately or schedule it to go out at a later time, and you can be as creative as you want with what you choose to post to different social networks. Also, since this social feature utilizes the capabilities of Publicaster social reporting, you can collect data about your social networking activities and their effects.

The social-only feature is found under Campaign Manager. Choose Send/Schedule:
social-only campaign step 1

First, choose if you want to add Google Analytics tracking to all of the links you include in your posting, and what part of the content you wish to track (email name, email subject or customer tracking title). If custom tracking title is your choice, you’ll be provided with a box to enter your text. The benefit the social only campaign is that if the links don’t work, then you can simply log in to your social network(s) and delete the post. There is a link checker in the Publicaster Creative Manager, which will even simulate links with Google Analytics added, or you can post to your network and test the links from there.

social-only campaign step 2

Another way you can garner right data from this feature is by enabling EyeView, which tracks the amount of time subscribers spend reading the content you’ve posted. If you’re not seeing EyeView as a part of your social-only campaign, it’s because this is an optional feature that gives you specific insight into the behavior of your social users, and targets who your social influencers are. EyeView costs a little extra, but is well worth it.

Next, you’ll want to insert a physical email address for the distribution by using information already stored in Publicaster or by entering a new address. The next part is pretty straightforward: Decide what campaign you want to use for this post. Want to save the details of this social posting for use in the future? Just name it, and Publicaster will save it.

social-only campaign step 3

Select the email template you want to use, and then get creative writing a subject line! If you don’t want to launch this post immediately, this is the part where you get to choose when you do want it to go out.

social-only campaign step 4

Now comes the actual social integration part where you choose on which social media outlets you want your campaign to appear. This is where you connect your Publicaster account to your Facebook, Twitter and/or LinkedIn accounts. The set up is a one-time event, and it the authentication process is done using OAUTH. If you are logged into your social media accounts outside of Publicaster, you can automatically connect by clicking on the social media icons in Publicaster:

social-only campaign step 5

After making sure your accounts are linked to Publicaster, it’s time to publish. Guess what? You’ve got more creative opportunity here, because you can –and should- write a short Facebook message. Make sure you choose the thumbnail you want to appear on Facebook with this post; if you let Facebook do it, you may end up with something good, but you may not. You’re off the hook with creating tag-alongs for Twitter and LinkedIn because it simply posts the subject line you’ve already written along with a web link.

social-only campaign step 6

The last step is to enter your email address and the email addresses of those you want to receive a notification when this social-only campaign goes out. Hit the “Share Content” button, and watch the magic happen!

Have questions about social-only campaigns? That’s what we’re here for. Just send an email to support@whatcounts.com and we’ll do our best to help you out.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL): What Does It Mean For You?

April 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Canadian flag

In December of 2010, Canada’s government passed the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL), designed to regulate specific areas of electronic commerce including what are known as Commercial Electronic Messages. Abbreviated CEMs, this term encompasses SMS messaging, social media messaging, and email communications. Although the enforcement date has not yet been set, enforcement is expected to begin in 2014, with a firm announcement of the date coming later in 2013.

In preparation for the enforcement date, we want to help explain some of the key points of the CASL and how it affects email senders. It’s important to note that these restrictions may change slightly before the enforcement date, but any major modifications are unlikely.

Consent

For an email marketer, the key tenet of CASL is the consent requirement. CASL prohibits senders from mailing anyone who has not explicitly requested that mailing. The consent must be affirmative – this means that a pre-checked box in a checkout process or on a registration page is NOT considered consent.

In all cases, if there is any question as to whether consent was provided, the burden of proof lies with the sender. This means that if you obtain consent to email a recipient, you must have records to back it up or you may be subject to penalties under the law.

For the first 3 years from the enforcement date, there will be an exception for senders who have an existing relationship with the email recipient. This includes both business (purchase history, site registration) and non-business (non-profit group membership) relationships. This exception is only valid if the recipient has not opted out or requested not to receive mailings. During that exception period, the sender must ask for, and receive, permission to continue sending mailings after the 3 years has passed.

Identification

CASL requires clear identification of the sender of any electronic message as well as any other party involved in message transmission. An Email Service Provider (ESP), like WhatCounts, would not need to be identified if they do not determine to whom the message is sent. However, if the mailing is sent on behalf of one or more affiliates, the identity of each affiliate must be included in the message.

Each message must also include the sender’s valid postal mailing address (PO Box is acceptable), and the address must remain valid for at least 60 days after the date of the mailing.

Unsubscribe Method

Much like the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States, CASL requires each message to contain an unsubscribe method that is clear, prominent, and able to be “readily performed.” While this language is a bit vague, it indicates that the unsubscribe process must be consumer-friendly, easy to access, and “without delay.” WhatCounts’ automated Unsubscribe process meets and exceeds these requirements today.

CASL for Non-Canadian Senders

While CASL applies to all email sent from or accessed in Canada, the law does include an exception for senders who are not based in Canada and have no reasonable expectation their email would be accessed in Canada.

If you are following opt-in email best practices, you’re already prepared for compliance with the CASL. If you have questions, or are not sure how you can improve your practices, the WhatCounts team is always ready to help. For further assistance, you can contact your Technical Account Manager or email support@whatcounts.com.

Brad Gurley
Director of Deliverability, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Personalization – Taking the First Steps with Smart Marketing

April 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

So you’re wowed by the Smart Marketing Engine, and by how personalization can help you send relevant messages through the combination of Right Data, Content and Automation. Now it’s time to put your money where your mouth is. We know personalization can be daunting, so we’ve created a checklist you can use to get started:

Step 1: Create a customer data map.

Follow the well-used KISS adage (Keep it Simple, Stupid): Know what data you have about your customers and the places where it’s stored. WhatCounts has clients that have done this with an Excel spreadsheet using one column for customer information, another for the system where that information is located, and one more for where the information is stored.

Step 2: Ask your customers what they want.

A.A. Milne said it best: “The things that make me different are the things that make me ‘me’.” Talking to customers is at the heart of personalization; you can’t give them what they want if you don’t ask them first. Don’t seek responses from a group of your customers. Instead, ask each customer what content is most valuable to him or her. For example, you could send a group survey to customers; however, you need to store each customer’s answers to that survey separately. Even if you think only a small portion of your list will respond to your questions, that’s still more people you have specific data about and to whom you can send personalized messages.

Step 3: Determine what your Right Data is.

What are the three most valuable personalization elements you could deliver to your customers? Don’t worry about automation at this point; we encourage you to dream that the data you need is there and you have access to it. From that dream, you can determine the answer to what your top personalization elements, or Right Data, should be.

Step 4: Create a content map.

Again, keep it simple with this step: Identify the content you generate, where it is stored, and if it is available as an RSS feed or XML (for automation purposes). If the content is digital or available on a feed, you are one step closer to a content automation strategy that lets you use the data you have in a real-time manner.

Step 5: Challenge yourself to use Smart Marketing and personalization today.

From now on, make a practical plan to include at least one point of personalization into every digital marketing action you execute. The elements of Smart Marketing should become a part of your daily digital marketing routine.

We know that Smart Marketing takes time and energy and lots of cups of coffee sometimes. But we also know that it is worth it; personalization is the key to subscriber engagement, and subscriber engagement will drive your revenue up.

Join us for the WhatCounts 2013 Digital Marketing Summit in Atlanta on April 24th and 25th to learn about how to get started with Smart Marketing.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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Filed Under: Best Practices, Content Marketing, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t Play Hide and Seek with Your Email Opt-In

March 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

What’s the point of any email program? Getting and retaining subscribers. You are not going to reach that goal when your customers have to play hide and seek to find the opt-in form for your emails. Your subscribe form should be easy to spot on your homepage, as well as other relevant pages on your website. The design should match your brand, and if copy is included, it should be creative and eye-catching.

Below is an example of a spot where a subscribe option should be located, but isn’t.

pixel size

Even if the email subscribe option had been included in this link line-up, it still would have been hard to find because this section is at the bottom of the page in a light gray, thin font. Also, redirecting users to another site in order to sign up is inconvenient. Why not include a sign-up box right on the page for them to enter their email addresses?

People don’t want to play games in order to find your email subscribe opt-in. They come to your website with a purpose in mind, and it’s probably not to opt-in to your emails. You have to make the opt-in appealing and obvious to your user, and you need to tell them what they are going to get out of it. Maybe it’s special deals, coupons, or insider information – whatever it is, tell your users about it up front and they’ll be more likely to subscribe. Check out the WhatCounts subscription form located on our homepage:

whatcounts opt-in form

Look at where your email opt-in form is located on your website. Is it buried at the bottom of the page, or located prominently so users clearly see it? Make sure the font is a comparable size to the other fonts on the page; you don’t want your message to disappear. If you are sending users to another page to sign up, consider adding a same-page, opt-in box instead. One more tip is to make sure that your social media buttons are not larger than your email ask graphic. You can measure revenue through both social media and email campaigns, so it is important to draw the same amount of attention to both of them.

Interested in learning more about creating smart email programs? Watch or download the slides to our free webinar, 5 Ways to Destroy Your Email Program.

Joy Ugi
Digital Marketing Coordinator, WhatCounts

18 Ways book cover
Audience to Evangelist
Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.
 Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

Share this page:

Filed Under: Best Practices, Design Tagged With: , , ,
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